Puerto Rican Workers Win Big

Labor activists battle business and deliver collective bargaining to public workers.

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO

Approximately 140,000 central government employees in Puerto Rico now have the right to collective bargaining for wages, working conditions and benefits. In an historic vote in February, the Puerto Rican legislature approved these bargaining rights, reflecting years of work by union activists and, most recently, intense grassroots efforts coordinated by the Servidores Públicos Unidos de Puerto Rico (SPU)/AFSCME — in English, United Public Employees of Puerto Rico.

"It was a huge step forward to get binding arbitration, after years of bureaucracy and stalemate," says Blanca Paniagua, a public accountant for the family services department and an SPU delegate. Paniagua says her job responsibilities have grown steadily, but her job classification and salary remain unchanged. For four years, her grievance for reclassification has been buried in red tape.

Fed up with her situation and impressed by SPU’s organizing efforts, Paniagua paid many visits to the Capitol to ask her legislators to vote for the new law. "I realized," she says, "that the injustices of job classifications would never be corrected without legal worker protections."

ORGANIZING DREAMS. Signing the collective bargaining law on Feb. 25, Gov. Pedro Rosselló said, "Today we make a very significant step and a fundamental advance to the principles of social justice and respect toward our co-workers in the public service." A significant step, yes, and a hard-fought one too.

In the past 15 years, a few bills were introduced to provide collective bargaining for public workers, but all were defeated. The failures were especially bitter because in 1945, workers at government-run utilities gained full collective bargaining rights.

The only concessions ever made to the central government workers were the rights to organize so-called bona fide or civil service associations, with dues check-off but no collective bargaining authority. The associations fought among themselves and were more frustrating than helpful to public workers. In family services, for instance, there were 11 associations, which failed to provide a unified voice for members because they agreed on very little.

SPU was formed in August 1995, just months after a collective bargaining bill had been defeated in the legislature. Some 50 men and women attended the first meeting of SPU, held in the city of Ponce. Among them was Linda Chavez-Thompson, then a leader of AFSCME Texas Council 42, who dramatically asked, "Do you believe in making this union happen?" Spontaneously, the group broke into a chant, "It can be done! It can be done!"

José La Luz was reassigned from AFSCME International headquarters to return to his native land where he would become executive director of the new labor organization. An organizer for years in the clothing and textile industry, La Luz said, "It was a dream for me to return as an organizer of Puerto Rican public employees."

The goal for SPU, says La Luz, was "to make SPU a uniquely Puerto Rican union, fighting for democratic participation by men and women public workers." Once working together, they could educate other government employees about the advantages — and necessity — of collective bargaining in their jobs. In a few years, SPU member ship had grown to 3,000. Employees such as Paniagua and Celso Rossy, president of SPU’s local at the natural resources department, left their associations to join the newly formed SPU. "We felt SPU, with its goal of collective bargaining, could help us most," Rossy notes.

SPU soon initiated the formation of the Alianza para un Nuevo Servicio Público (Alliance for a New Public Service) to work in concert for a collective bargaining bill. The Alianza was made up of affiliates of the Service Employees International Union, United Food and Commercial Workers and AFSCME, each of which supported building a grassroots organization to lobby for the bill.

It helped that the bill had support in the governor’s mansion, but despite Governor Rosselló’s solid backing of collective bargaining rights, passage of the legislation seemed, at times, impossible. The powerful Chamber of Commerce lobbied intensely to defeat the bill. Afraid that government unions would lead to more unionization elsewhere, the Chamber charged that the bill would lead to higher payroll costs. It also tried to convince workers that "U.S. unions were coming in to take their money away" and to usurp local control.

When the Chamber found that it couldn’t defeat the bill, it started to weaken it. Numerous changes had to be made to ensure the bill’s passage. Law enforcement, court, legislative, university and municipal employees were excluded from its coverage. In the final minutes before the bill’s passage, fair share or agency fees were eliminated.

In the end, however, the favorable vote was a dramatic victory, where a few legislators courageously crossed party lines to vote for the bill, an extremely rare occurrence in Puerto Rican politics.

SOLID BASE. While neither Labor nor the governor got all that they wanted, as Governor Rosselló put it, "This is a solid base for [public sector] labor law in Puerto Rico." Passage of the collective bargaining bill, many believe, will make workers more comfortable with joining a union. And La Luz predicts that union membership will increase dramatically in Puerto Rico from today’s 6 percent to 30 percent of all workers.

La Luz has made it a priority to address the law’s weaknesses, however. SPU, he says will "lobby for an enlightened set of regulations for the collective bargaining process. Another priority is to gain fair share dues collection for unions."

SPU’s immediate efforts, though, are preparing for the union petition drives and representation votes. Representation petitions can be filed anytime after January 1, 1999.

"How a union does in this process depends on the strategic use of its most important resource — its members; to empower and mobilize them to become volunteer organizers in the effort," La Luz believes.

SPU already has a firm foothold with central government employees. The natural resources local, for instance, now has 620 members, almost half of the department’s workforce.

When word of a recent lunch-time gathering of the local’s members got out, Miguel Delgado came by and asked if he could join the group. A maintenance person in the 400-year-old, rundown natural resources building, Delgado says there is too much work, but complaints about it are met with threats of privatization. Delgado wants to know more about this union called SPU and the promise of collective bargaining. Over the coming months, he and thousands of other Puerto Rican public employees will hear a lot from union organizers.

By Catherine Barnett Alexander